Linkfest: Business and entrepreneurship

I am experimenting with Liferea (Linux Feed Reader) as my RSS reader. Before, I used Bloglines. The change gave me an excuse to go back to my Bloglines clippings folder and look at some old posts I had saved. It is good to look back sometimes, so here are some of the better posts on business and entrepreneurship that caught my attention.

Ross Mayfield gives invaluable advice to people who are about to graduate from college and wants to be entrepreneurs, starting with change your major (to focus on critical thinking and communications). Some of his points:

Start a business - just do it

Take responsibility beyond your years - or rather: your qualifications

Go abroad

Experiment at the margin - absolutely right!

Pay yourself - easier to forget than you might think...

Work with good people

Stick to ethics

Start a weblog - he would say that on his blog, wouldn't he? But it is true

And a classic Ross Mayfield-ism: When I was a kid I bought a book, "how to make money with your Apple II+," written by some other kid. None of the business ideas made sense to me. Except publishing that book. Read the post and learn.

TJ points to an article over on Dispatches Weblog titled There is More Than One Kind of Startup. Unfortunately, the server sends the wrong character encoding and all the pictures are stretched, making them very hard to read, but stick with it, to read about:

Andrew Anker wonders about the international thing: How quickly should a Silicon Valley start-up move from only focusing on the domestic U.S. market to thinking about a move abroad, and has the assessment of the best time changed recently?

Traditionally, international markets were not important. From all appearances, this is drastically changing. As start-up dollars cease to go into marketing they are increasingly moving to international expansion. [...] [T]he earlier stage web companies I'm speaking with are thinking of a global footprint as a must-have, not a nice-to-have. Or maybe more appropriately, not even thinking of the international thing as anything particularly special. The Internet has so lowered the barriers to info-trade that Europe and Asia are just a few more hops away.

The emergence of increasingly sophisticated local sources of "pre-seed," seed stage, and growth capital around the country is both necessary and encouraging. But, it strikes me that regional approaches aren't sufficient. The startup game is truly becoming global, and the paths to the world go through the established venture centers of Silicon Valley and Boston.

The Dispatches Weblog makes a strong argument for the conclusion that centralized venture capital will continue to dominate based on arguments around the cost of building a risk capital infrastructure and the increasing transparency in the industry making such an investment less and less relevant.

After seeing yet another Power Point presentation by a new business to the potential VC investor, Brad Feld decides to share with you the structure you should follow in some detail. Read the article for the detailed points; the top level questions you should answer are:

Ed Sim has a useful post on how to run an efficient board meeting, including an outline of the standard agenda, with links to further discussions. If you are a company chairman, board member, or investor, read this post.

Bnoopy reminds us that opportunity breeds more opportunity. You should pursue opportunities when then present themselves (always take a cookie when they are passed): you never know where they may lead. Nothing new, but always a useful reminder.

Ed Sim has an incredible important article for all entrepreneurs. I can remember how many times the CEO of a start-up company has told me excitedly about his partnership with IBM or some such organization. Read this article and its five rules

Don't rely on corporate; engage at the field level.

Focus, narrowly focus your opportunities.

Your partner's sales force needs to get comped.

Dedicate the proper amount of resources to make the partnership successful.

3 CX priorities for 8 company cultures:
Customer Experience (CX) initiatives often have a strong focus on changing the corporate culture. And rightly so. But culture is hard and we have found...
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CX Conversations: Are yours unhelpful?:
Cassandra Goodman makes a passionate plea for Customer Experience (CX) leaders to focus on what matters: improving the business through better customer- and employee experience....
(~246 words)

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